Wednesday, April 13, 2011

National Spectrum Act Of India In Pipeline

Telecom related issues and decisions of India government are neither productive nor in the national interest. This gives lots of scope for corruption and scams like 2G scam. With increasing incidences of corruption, scams and frauds in India, a public anti corruption movement erupted and this led to the commitment to formulate the Jan Lokpal Bill 2011.

However, corruption related issues, including telecom scams, cannot be tackled effectively till we have a strong and effective Jan Lokpal Act 2011. The same must be supplemented with strong telecom related laws. Fortunately, Indian government is planning to enact a National Spectrum Act for better management of scarce spectrum resources, among other things.

Further, Indian government is also in the process of formulating the National Telecom Policy 2011 (NTP-2011), which is likely to come into effect by this year-end. However, there are some other important issues that have skipped the attention of Indian government.

Issues like Consumer Friendly National Telecom policy of India, Telecom Security of India, establishment of Telecom Security Council of India, establishment of Telecom Security Regulatory Authority of India (TSRAI), etc must be considered by Indian Government in general and Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) in particular on a “priority basis”, suggests Praveen Dalal, managing partner of New Delhi based law firm Perry4Law and leading techno legal expert of India. Further, Telecom Security Policy of India must also be formulated as soon as possible as India has already taken more than enough time in this regard, suggests Dalal.